It is extremely difficult for a judge to discern whether entirely truthful information is being conveyed. Evidence can be slanted or even fabricated. Unsupportable accusations can be made without objection or opposition. Exculpatory material can be concealed, and almost no one would know. In essence, the system is vulnerable to deception because there is no adverse party there to challenge the authenticity and veracity of the documents submitted. A conscientious judge can try to do so, but it is impossible to know how frequently this occurs. The judges’ various interactions with federal prosecutors are completely hidden from public view to protect what is purported to be classified national security information. What is known is that the FISC approves roughly 99 percent of surveillance requests.31 In the first thirty-three years of the court’s existence, it considered more than 33,900 applications, approving all of them except eleven.32 That constitutes a rejection rate of a mere .03 percent.33 These startling figures alone create a suspicion of abuse.
It is tempting to conclude that the judges on the FISC simply rubber-stamp whatever the government submits to them. This impression was fueled when documents produced by the Justice Department in September 2018 revealed that no formal court hearings had been held for any of the four successive surveillance warrants that were sought to spy on Carter Page.34 As a consequence, no stenographic record exists of what questions, if any, were asked by the judges or the verbal representations that were made in court by the FBI and DOJ. However, this does not mean that there were no interactions beyond the paper submissions to the FISC. Formal hearings are not required. Sometimes the judge or a staff member will ask questions informally during in-person conversations or over a secured telephone line and seek additional information.35 On other occasions, there might be no interaction whatsoever, and the warrant application is approved. If a judge signals that he or she is reluctant to sign off on surveillance, the government will often request a formal hearing.36
In the case of the Page warrants, there were no such hearings. Any other interactions that may have happened have not been made public and likely never will be. So it is difficult to assess whether the judges applied some level of scrutiny or, perhaps, none at all. It may have been the case that the FISC was overwhelmed. In 2016, the court had to process more than twenty-eight applications, on average, every week.37 It is hard to envision how a single judge can handle so many requests in such a short period and give each of them the deliberate and careful examination it deserves. However, the Page warrants were not the customary or conventional fare before the FISC. This was, after all, spying on an associate of a presidential candidate and accessing his communications with the campaign. The political alchemy was glaring. The government of a Democratic administration was seeking permission to surveil the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.38 That elevated electronic eavesdropping to a whole new and combustible level that demanded a serious and sober examination of the legal justification. Did any of the FISC judges who considered the initial warrant and three renewal warrants say to themselves or their staffs, “Gee . . . we should probably hold a formal and extensive hearing on the record before I affix my signature to these extraordinary documents granting the power to spy on a presidential campaign.”
Had such a hearing been convened, surely each of the judges would have asked government lawyers where they had obtained the document (the “dossier”) upon which they so wholly relied in their application to spy. Who composed it? Is this person (Steele) as reliable and credible as you contend? Has he expressed an intense political bias? Was this opposition research? Who paid for it? Who exactly are the sources cited in the document? Have their accusations been verified or corroborated? Is there any exculpatory information about Page of which we should be made aware? Did you notify the candidate that Russians might have tried to infiltrate or influence his campaign? Further, one wonders whether any of the FISC judges ever requested to examine the “dossier” itself from which the surveillance application was largely drawn. If they had, it would surely have been tossed into the nearest trash can, along with the warrant, for lack of “probable cause.” These are the kinds of legitimate inquiries that the unique circumstances compelled. This is especially true given Page’s history of helping the FBI prosecute Russian agents. That critical fact seems to have been conveniently omitted in the documents presented to the court.
The Persecution of Carter Page
Carter Page was probably one of the most insignificant individuals involved in the Trump campaign in 2016. He never met the candidate or spoke with him.39 There were no electronic communications between the two men. To put it bluntly, Page was a political ornament. He was so peripheral and invisible that few people in the hierarchy of the campaign organization, including Trump, could have picked him out of a lineup. He was hastily selected, as many others were, to serve as an uncompensated volunteer on the Trump foreign policy advisory council. The group was assembled almost overnight by Sam Clovis, who would later become cochair of the campaign. There was apparently very little deliberation and scant vetting of anyone. It was a do-nothing job that was intended to mollify critics who claimed that the presumptive GOP nominee was inexperienced in international relations and deficient in his US foreign policy credentials. The board was window dressing. It literally became a photo op at one point, and Page wasn’t even there the day cameras were clicking.
Every campaign tends to engage in such a charade. It cobbles together an economics council or a health care board or a tax cut committee. If the candidate at some juncture needs a talking point or a rebuttal to a thorny issue, an adviser is occasionally consulted. Periodically, the members will convene and talk. The candidate is rarely in attendance. Some “advisers” write position papers that almost no one reads. Their reports get deep-sixed in a file cabinet in a back office. Sometimes, they will help edit a speech that focuses on their specialty. If the candidate wins, the same individuals typically vie for positions in the new administration. Some are picked, while others are thanked for their service and unceremoniously shown the door with the faux-sincere promise “We’ll be in touch.” It is quintessential politics—image over substance.
Trump was reluctant to play the customary game, but eventually he relented and capitulated. In March 2016, he decided to burnish his foreign policy bona fides by naming less than a dozen people to his board. One of them was Carter Page. Another was George Papadopoulos, a young policy consultant in oil and gas. Like Page, he had never met Trump. In his testimony before Congress, Page described himself as “a junior, unpaid adviser.”40 The record reflects that not much advice was ever given or taken.
If Page can be blamed for making a mistake in retrospect, it rests squarely on his fateful decision to accept an invitation from the New Economic School (NES) in Moscow to serve as one of its commencement speakers on July 8, 2016. The NES had been founded years earlier with American and Western support. Page was flattered to be asked and did not consider his acceptance to be problematic. Why would it be? He knew that President Barack Obama had spoken at the school’s commencement on July 7, 2009, just six months after taking office. No one had batted an eye back then or accused him of being a Russian spy. The New York Times had even printed a text of Obama’s speech for its American readers.41 The president had lavished praise on the “new Russia,” spoken of a global partnership with other nations, and called for a revitalized bilateral effort at cooperation and goodwill. He had reiterated his previous desire for “a ‘reset’ in relations between the United States and Russia.”42 Obama’s proposed rapprochement was strikingly similar to what candidate Trump would advocate seven years later while on the campaign trail to succeed him. Obama’s words had been heralded as visionary. Trump’s words earned him accusations of being a Russian sympathizer.
Page surmised that the NES had been interested primarily in inviting someone associated, however tangentially, with the upcoming 2016 presidential election.43 He alerted the Trump team of his speaking engagement and received per
mission to proceed, as long as it was understood that he was not in any way representing the Trump campaign during his visit.44 Page agreed and accepted the invitation, never envisioning that such an innocuous trip would soon engulf him in a controversy that would ruin his business, deprive him of income, and make him a target (and victim) of a yearlong surveillance operation by the FBI. As Page would subsequently lament, “It’s just so outrageous, preposterous. Where do you even begin?”45 How could he possibly defend himself against the full force of the FBI, DOJ, and other government actors who branded him, without evidence, as a traitor? How often would his protestations of innocence fall on deaf ears?
The speech Page delivered at the NES was nowhere near as ingratiating toward Moscow as Obama’s message. There was nothing polemic or apologetic about the unpaid adviser’s words; they were rather banal. And there was nothing clandestine in his appearance at the venue, since his speech was televised locally in Russia and can still be seen on YouTube.46 Since the NES was supported by the Kremlin, numerous Russian leaders were in attendance. When Obama spoke, former president Mikhail Gorbachev had been seated in the audience, along with then president Dmitry Medvedev. When Page spoke, other Russian leaders were present, although not as high ranking or distinguished. Page would later testify that he had never met privately with any of those officials before or after his speech. No evidence was ever produced to the contrary. Other than shaking a few hands and saying “Hello,” his recorded appearance at the school itself was the sum total of all interactions with Kremlin officials.
Upon returning to the United States, Page sent to the campaign what he characterized as a “readout” or synopsis of his visit to Russia.47 It might appear from his analysis that he had gathered information from Russians directly, perhaps during private conversations. In that regard, Page was probably guilty of an “unfortunate habit of self-puffery,” as one writer described it.48 However, the observations in his “readout” were derived mainly from listening to other speeches, reading Russian newspapers, and watching Russian television. The details of his synopsis were excruciatingly boring, and the totality of his insights was inconsequential. The information had not, as Page would later testify, been acquired during surreptitious meetings with Russian leaders who were hoping to influence the 2016 campaign.
But that was not what Christopher Steele alleged. In his “dossier,” he seized on Page’s visit to Moscow to accuse him of conspiring with Russian officials to unduly influence the election in favor of Trump. Page is identified several times in the document. On page 9 (the July 19, 2016, memo) it is alleged that Page held “secret meetings” with Igor Sechin, the chief executive officer of the Russian energy giant Rosneft, and Igor Diveykin, a senior Kremlin internal affairs official. The “dossier” claims that the “lifting of western sanctions” was discussed and the Russian officials allegedly “hinted” that they had “kompromat” (compromising information) “on Trump which the latter should bear in mind in his dealings with them.”49 The document noted that “Page was non-committal in response.”
The only sin committed by Page was traveling to Russia to deliver a rather mundane speech.
Steele and his employer, Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS, saw to it that Page’s nonexistent secret meetings with Russians were leaked to the media and delivered to the FBI. The Wall Street Journal contacted him on July 26, 2016, and inquired about the alleged secret meetings with Kremlin officials that were cited in the “dossier.” Page said it was all “ridiculous” and had never happened.50 Other journalists started pestering him. They had been furnished the “dossier” by Simpson and Steele. No reporter specifically identified Page by name in a story until Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News fell for the hoax. His story was published on September 23, 2016, and alleged that US intelligence officials were monitoring and investigating Page over secret talks with Russians.51 When Page read it, he was stunned. The article cited a statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Representative Adam Schiff that seemed to tie him to a suspected Russian scheme “intended to influence the outcomes of the election.”52
Isikoff’s story was a near replica of Steele’s fictitious account of meetings with Sechin and Divyekin. The reporter had read the “dossier” or been fed its contents verbatim when he met with Steele in September 2016 in a private upstairs room at a Washington restaurant that had been booked by Simpson.53 What Isikoff did not disclose to his readers was that his “source” was working for Democrats who had paid for the material. Nor did he disclose that the same source had previously given the identical information to the FBI that triggered the investigation Isikoff was reporting.54 His article referred to his source as a “well-placed Western intelligence source.”55 In fact, Steele was no longer an intelligence agent but a private contractor for hire. That was a significant distinction that created an illusion of importance where little existed. Readers were misled or fooled. Greater accuracy would have cast doubt on the credibility of the reporting. But most of all, Isikoff did not or could not confirm any of the “dossier’s” allegations against Page that he had held secret meetings with Russians. More than two years later, when the “collusion” balloon burst, Isikoff admitted that he and other journalists “should have approached this, in retrospect, with more skepticism.”56 No kidding. This is the conceit and folly of hindsight. There can be no substitute for scrupulous reporting or excuse for the failure to perform rigorous fact checking, especially when using anonymous sources.
When Isikoff’s story was published, it went viral. Page’s shock turned to anger. He had done none of the things of which he was so recklessly accused. He had conspired with no one, including Russians. Within two days, the furious Page fired off a letter to FBI director James Comey advising that the accusations against him were “completely false.”57 He explained to the director that he had assisted the FBI and CIA for many years by virtue of his work as “an American consultant with Russian expertise.”58 Indeed, he had acted as a valuable source for the agencies. Instead of responding to Page or having the FBI interview him, Comey prepared and executed a warrant application to have him wiretapped and to secretly access all of his electronic communications. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates also signed off on it. At the time, Page had no idea that the FBI was spying on him. Agents would continue to do so for roughly a year. For the next two years, his life would become a living hell as the media villainized him. He was spied on by the FBI and excoriated by Democrats.
When Page was finally allowed to defend himself more than a year later in a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee on November 2, 2017, he explained that his only contact with Russian officials during his July visit to Moscow had been a few brief encounters in the very hall where he had delivered his speech. He described them as “greetings and brief conversation.”59 They had all been benign and inconsequential. Page said he had shaken hands with Arkady Dvorkovich, the deputy prime minister of Russia, after the speaking event. Their exchange had lasted less than ten seconds.60 However, Representative Schiff grilled Page at length about that encounter, determined to demonstrate that it had somehow constituted an illicit “meeting” to steal the presidential election from Clinton.61 In typical fashion, Schiff turned the congressional hearing into a theater of the absurd.
Page denounced Steele’s uncorroborated “dossier,” calling it “totally preposterous.” Secret meetings that were detailed in the document had never happened, he told Schiff. He insisted he had not discussed the Trump campaign with Russians, had never “colluded” with them, and had not been involved in the hacking of Democratic emails, as Steele had asserted.
Schiff was undeterred, convinced that he had cornered the hobgoblin of a grand conspiracy. Citing the “dossier’s” October 18, 2016, memo (page 30), he accused Page of having been offered a “19 percent stake in the Russian energy company Rosneft in return for lifting sanctions on Russia.” Pause for a moment to consider how idiotic that was. Would Moscow offer the equivalent of $11 billion to a volunteer “
unpaid, junior advisor” who had never met the presidential candidate in exchange for the prospect of lifting Western sanctions, which could only occur if that candidate won the race that polls showed he would lose? That, of course, did not stop Schiff from advancing the theory in a lengthy harangue. Page sat there flabbergasted that anyone, much less a US congressman, would even consider such drivel. It was classic Schiff.
Of course, the ridiculous Rosneft bribe never happened. It was just one of more than a dozen false accusations that Steele had conjured up for his phony “dossier.” It appears to have been Russian disinformation that he was more than delighted to accept. If Steele thought for one moment that it was true, he has to rank as the most gullible and inept ex–British spy ever to work for MI6. More likely, he knew it was untrue but was eager to exploit it to smear the man he admittedly “despised”—Donald Trump. Some of it Steele may have simply invented himself. He was being paid handsomely by the Clinton machine to manufacture derogatory information about Trump. To that end, he was an obsequious manipulator. The more gossip he could dish for the Clinton benediction, the more he would profit financially. Page was merely an expendable pawn in the spy game and an innocent victim of Steele’s treachery.
The FBI Lies to the FISA Court to Justify Its Crusade Against Trump
It is a crime to lie to a judge. Depending on the case and circumstances, it could constitute numerous felonies, including perjury, false and misleading statements, obstruction of justice, fraud, conspiracy to defraud, deprivation of rights under color of law, electronic surveillance under color of law, and contempt of court.62 Those crimes were all described at length in chapter 7 (“Government Abuse of Surveillance”) of The Russia Hoax and explained in the context of how senior officials at the FBI and Department of Justice appear to have committed those crimes by spying on Carter Page.63 Four judges signed off on four successive warrants approving the surveillance. But under the law, if the government deceived those judges, it means that lawful warrants were obtained by unlawful means. To put it simply, the judges committed no crimes, but any person who lied to them did. The evidence is compelling that this is what happened.
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